GÜNTER WAND, the German conductor who has died aged 90, did not
attain
international recognition of his extraordinary gifts as an interpreter
until he was nearly 70; indeed, most of his career was spent in Cologne
and Hamburg, where he was a Kapellmeister in the highest tradition.

Although he made his London debut in 1951, conducting the London
Symphony Orchestra in a Beethoven programme at Covent Garden, it was
not until 1981, when he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra, that he
made the kind of impact on the British public and critics that the
elderly Klemperer had made 25 years earlier. This appearance led to his
appointment for several years as chief guest conductor of the BBC
orchestra. His London concerts thereafter became occasions at which one
could be confident of encountering the traditional virtues of lucidity,
balance and integrity.

In recent years, his visit to the Edinburgh Festival
with the North
German Radio Orchestra of Hamburg, usually to perform a Bruckner
symphony, was the musical climax of the festival. He was especially
fond of the Eighth, which he
also took to the London Proms on several
occasions. Ironically, when he unexpectedly succeeded Klaus Tennstedt
as the orchestra's conductor, it was booked for the Festival with
Tennstedt. But because at that time no one in Edinburgh had heard of
Wand, the booking was cancelled. The Proms invited him instead and
enjoyed a triumph, often repeated.

The performance he conducted of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony in the
Festival Hall in November 1986 was by common consent held to be one of
the greatest in the hall's 35 years of existence. His Schubert Great C
major had a momentum and vitality akin to Sir Adrian Boult's in
this
work, and his interpretations of the Brahms symphonies - fortunately
available on discs, like his Schubert - were distinguished by tempi
that sound exactly right, and by an inner fieriness that one feels
comes direct from the music and not from something alien imposed upon
it by the conductor. For Wand, time, space and light were of the
essence.

It was, though, in Bruckner that Wand could be heard at his finest, not
only in the monumental splendours of the last three symphonies but in
the more problematical early examples, such as Nos 1 and 2, where
cogency and enthusiasm combined to give a deeply satisfying result. He
favoured the editions by Robert Haas.

He recorded all the nine symphonies with the Cologne Radio Symphony
Orchestra, preferring to work with radio orchestras because they
provided more rehearsal time, and re-recorded most of them with the
Berlin Philharmonic or Hamburg orchestras. His style of conducting was
unflamboyant, although he did not eschew the occasional expansive
gesture. Flashiness, however, was outside his ken.

At the Edinburgh Festival in 2000, he looked almost too frail to reach
the podium but, when he got there, unleashed a remarkable Bruckner
Eight.

Gunter Wand was born at Elberfeld on January 7 1912. After lessons in
Wuppertal and at Cologne University, he studied at Cologne Conservatory
and High School for Music under Phillip Jarnach for composition and
Paul Baumgartner for piano. He worked as repetiteur and assistant
conductor at Wuppertal and Allenstein before becoming chief conductor
at Detmold. He was then principally an opera conductor, specialising in
Mozart and Verdi.

He was a conductor at Cologne Opera from 1939 until 1944, when the
opera house was destroyed. For a year Wand went to Salzburg to conduct
the Mozarteum Orchestra, but returned to Cologne in 1945 as music
director of the opera. Cologne's population had been reduced by war
from nearly half a million to 40,000, and Wand wanted to take part in
the revival of the city initiated by his friend Konrad Adenauer.

He now began to study the orchestral repertoire so that from 1946 he
could take over the Gurzenich concerts which had once been conducted by
Fritz Steinbach. This engagement, on a 10-year contract, was later
extended to a life appointment. Wand also joined the teaching staff of
Cologne High School for Music, becoming a professor in 1948.

Although Wand's programmes usually had a classical basis (some would
say bias), he did not neglect contemporary music. He conducted much
Stravinsky and Bartók (he recorded the latter's Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta) and works by the Cologne composer
Bernd-Alois
Zimmermann. He also conducted works by Messiaen, Varèse and
Ligeti. In
1974 he resigned his Cologne posts and went to Switzerland as guest
conductor of the Berne Symphony Orchestra. He then began his regular
association with the Hamburg Radio Orchestra, becoming its chief
conductor in 1982, and with Munich. He was also a composer.

Wand was not the easiest of men to deal with. In his autobiography, Sir
John Drummond, who encountered him when he was Edinburgh Festival
director and later as Controller of BBC Radio 3, described a visit to
the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995 when Wand was "frail,
short-tempered, and endlessly critical of the orchestra". At dinner at
the Hyde Park Hotel after a successful concert, Drummond asked Wand to
cheer up and was shouted at for his pains. This, Drummond wrote, was
typical of Wand's "Janus-like behaviour - all sweetness and light and
`Du, mein lieber Freund' one
moment and foul language and boorish
behaviour the next".

Wand and his wife lived in Switzerland in recent years.

[Note: A tribute from The Guardian by Sir John Drummond
appears at the bottom of this webpage.]

In January of 1989, conductor Günter Wand made his
American debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His program
included the Symphony #1 of
Brahms (which was recorded by RCA, photo at left) and the Schubert Unfinished Symphony. Early in
the following season he would return for the Bruckner Symphony #5. Despite his lack
of self-aggrandizement, he agreed to meet with me the day after
completing his first series of concerts.

His English was quite good, though we had a translator on hand to
furnish words and phrases as needed. He would often repeat
thoughts with slightly different words in hopes of making his ideas
clear and understood. At the end, he mentioned that the English
he learned in school was still used in England, but it was different
than “American.”

In editing the conversation, my aim (as always) is to render the
thoughts as clearly and accurately as possible. To that end, I
have corrected grammatical errors, but have left some of the charming
turns of phrase which reveal the process going on in his mind.
Consider this an oil painting which displays artful feelings. I
have removed a few smudges and framed it in appropriate light. It
is not a photograph which is cold but accurate to the sharpest detail.

Here is that conversation . . . . . . .

Bruce Duffie:
I want to ask perhaps an impertinent question. A lot has been
made about your desire for many rehearsals, and I don’t wish to go into
that so much, but I’d like to ask if the first performance of a concert
is perhaps an additional rehearsal for the second performance?

Günter Wand:
No one musician, I think, said we had too much rehearsal. No one
musician. When I had five rehearsals and I’m satisfied, then it’s
good. But I’m absolutely convinced when I had seven rehearsals
it’s better than five rehearsals. With the BBC Orchestra in London
— which is a very good orchestra — I
had twenty-five or twenty-six hours of rehearsal, and not one musician
came to me and said it was too much. They all say, “We had a
fantastic week with you. Thank you, thank you.” So, that’s
my answer. A conductor has to say some practical things to the
music professional, not philosophical ideas. It’s only in Chicago
that I am always asked why I had five rehearsals. I think it is
better to look what happens after the rehearsals. In the
newspaper was written that I had a double rehearsal, like Georg
Solti. [See my Interview
with Sir Georg Solti.] That’s not true. He had four, I
have five. That’s all. I see the orchestra the first time
in my life, and it was very exciting. It’s not so easy to come in
a country that you have never seen. It’s my first time in
America. Nobody speaks German and I don’t know what’s happens,
but I am so happy to feel that the musicians agree with me. That
is the most important thing for a conductor — to have the feeling the
musicians are also happy.

BD: We are
very happy that you have come to Chicago.

GW: But
already know that before?

BD: Some of
us were anticipating this with great eagerness.

GW: [Laughs]

BD: You have
the rehearsals and at the first performance you are pleased or not
pleased. Is the second performance and the third performance and
the next performance after that better each time?

GW: I hope it
is better each time! I try to do my best, and the musicians do
too, but we are human beings. Not every day is the same. I
was very happy on the Saturday concert. I think it was the best
of the three concerts.

BD: All the
time in rehearsals and performances you’re working toward a musical
perfection. Do you ever get that musical perfection?

GW: Oh, I
think it’s not possible. No human being can make it total
perfection, no. Nobody can do it. Not in this time, not in
earlier times, not in the future. I am absolutely sure. It
cannot be.

BD: Do you
get very close to it, though?

GW: A
wonderful piano player is one person. He has a wonderful
instrument and he plays well. A conductor has an instrument of
eighty musicians or a hundred musicians, and each musician is a
personality. He has his own distinct effect, his own health and
his own daily condition. Perhaps he is frustrated and perhaps he
hates the conductor. I can understand that. So how can you
have perfection? You are very happy to feel that all is ensemble
in feeling with you. The baton makes no sound and can’t produce a
tone. The music comes from the flute and the oboe and the trumpet
and the horn and the strings and so on.

BD: You talk
about the conductor and the soloists and the orchestra. Does the
audience have all of these problems and expectations also?

GW: Not so
much. When I begin to conduct, I forget absolutely what’s behind
me. It’s true. Surely, if anybody coughs loudly I hear it,
but I forget it. I am of that ilk. I forget everything
except the music.

BD: Do you
have any expectations of the audience?

GW: That they are quiet; that is
all. That they listen also with their heart, not only with their
ears. I can feel it when it is absolutely quiet. It’s
fantastic in the proms in London. Seven or eight thousand
people. I made there the Fifth
Bruckner, the Eighth
Bruckner, the Fourth Bruckner
and Brahms, and you hear nothing! You think there’s nobody
there! It’s fantastic. It’s really fantastic. It’s
absolutely quiet. Young people, old people, sitting people,
standing room only, but it’s absolutely quiet. It is similar in
the NHK Hall in Tokyo with four thousand people. It’s absolutely
quiet. I feel that I have taken the audience only for the music.

BD: Can there
ever be too much concentration on the music?

GW: Not at
all.

BD: Let me
ask a balance question. In the concert music that you conduct,
where is the balance between the artistic achievement and an
entertainment value?

GW: It
belongs from the music that I do, but I think a Mozart serenade, like
the Posthorn Serenade or the Haffner Serenade is also great
music. It is written for entertainment, but it is eternal
music. It’s Mozart! You like a little flower from the
meadow and you like a great big tree, but they both are creations of
God. You can serve God very seriously, and perhaps also when you
are happy. A Mozart serenade is entertainment music and also
eternal music because it is so right and divine. In my earlier
years, I began with twenty years as a professional conductor in the
opera house. I conducted many operettas of Strauss and Lehar and
I always tried to do them with all my professional knowledge and also
with my musician’s heart. I like to do
music when I have fewer worries with dumb administration things.
It is always every time, administration. When I take a score of
Schubert or Bruckner, for theses two hours I am absolutely quiet.
It is like medicine. When I then think what happened with these
fantastic, great composers, what happened in their life, what they must
do, how they must have suffered, then I am absolutely quiet. You
know the great biography of Beethoven by Thayer? When I read
that, then I become quiet in comparison, like Beethoven and what he
must have suffered in his life.

BD: Do you
suffer with Beethoven?

GW: No.
I think it’s not so important that I must suffer also.

BD: What is
it about the scores of Schubert or Bruckner or Beethoven, that make
them so great?

GW: I think
they all — Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven — have
written music that gives the feeling of the time when they were
living. The beginning of Beethoven was the French
Revolution. It is absolutely clear what happened there, but the
real great music is never private. Never! It’s always a
feeling of circumstances of the time, a feeling of the society.
Haydn and Mozart, and then came the French Revolution with
égalité, liberté, fraternité. In the First Symphony of Beethoven, you
hear this idea in the music, but you do not hear the private feeling of
Beethoven. He gives an impression of the feeling of a time.
Bruckner gives the feeling of the cosmos. After Beethoven it
began with Schumann and then Brahms and then Mahler to give the private
feeling of the composer in the composition — his
troubles, his love, his all. It was a time when one human being
seemed to be so important that his own feeling is most important.
Now we have self-awareness, the importance of my person!

BD: This is a
mistake?

GW:
Yes. It’s a great mistake, I think, absolutely a great mistake I
am sure.Bruckner goes back in
thinking sometimes to Bach and the Middle Ages. You never can
feel a private feeling in Bruckner’s music. Never. When a
conductor needs this music to give his feeling, this is criminal.
You can not play Bach with your own feeling; you have to serve.
This is what I try to do, and it’s the most difficult to feel once more
what happened in the composer’s life when he
wrote it. That is the most difficult. I will not need the
music to express my private ideas. I will feel why the
composition goes so and not so. I will feel the creative act, the
composition’s act. It is immense. It’s like complete
craziness. When you try to do this, then you become modest, and
then you agree only to serve the music.

BD: Are you
serving the music or are you serving the composer?

GW: The
music, the composer’s music. I serve to the composer and his
music. The music has nothing to do with my entertainment. I
am not a play actor, not a pantomime, not a dancer. I am only a
conductor, a musician.

BD: How much
interpretation do you bring to all of this?

GW: I just
said it. I try to feel the composer’s idea when he wrote
it. That is the most difficult interpretation that can be!
That’s the interpretation of the music, that I will feel why the
composer wrote it so and not another way. It’s a very long
operation, a very long operation.

BD: In any of
these works, is there only one way to present them?

GW: I will
interpret the music. I can do it. I have a very warm and
human feeling. I can use the music for my own hoorah, but then
I’d rather be dead. Heilige
Musik, holy music. In the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos of Strauss, the
Composer says the music is heilige
Kunst. Music is a holy art to change all matters of
courage.

BD: And you
agree with this?

GW: Yes, it’s
fantastic! Ja.

*
* *
* *

BD: We’ve
talked about a number of composers. Are there some composers
still writing today who have this spark?

GW:
Yes. There are some composers who are really my friends.
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was long my friend. I did four or five
premieres. I conducted the first performance of his Symphony. It’s shocking
always, even now. It is written more than thirty five years ago,
but it’s still shocking. I also think highly of Messiaen,
Bartók, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus
sixteen is fantastic music. It’s written in the time of Emperor
William II in 1910! It was given for the first time in the Proms
in London in 1912, before the First World War.

The 1912 and 1913 Prom seasons
are singled out by historian David Cox as among the finest of this part
of Henry Wood's career. Among those conducting their own works or
hearing Wood conduct them were Strauss, Debussy, Reger, Scriabin,
Rachmaninoff and Schoenberg. Rehearsing Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Wood
urged his players, "Stick to it, gentlemen! This is nothing to what
you'll have to play in 25 years' time". The critic Ernest Newman wrote,
"It is not often that an English audience hisses the music it does not
like, but a good third of the people at Queen's Hall last Tuesday
permitted themselves that luxury after the performance of the five
orchestral pieces of Schoenberg. Another third of the audience was only
not hissing because it was laughing, and the remaining third seemed too
puzzled either to laugh or to hiss; so that on the whole it does not
look as if Schoenberg has so far made many friends in London." The
composer was delighted with the performance and congratulated Wood and
the orchestra warmly, "I must say it was the first time since Gustav
Mahler that I heard such music played again as a musician of culture
demands." Wood programmed the work again in 1914, when it was much more
warmly received.

-- From an article about Henry
Wood

The third movement is called Chord-Colors. You think it’s Ligeti
because it’s all for the future. It is so valuable! It is
genius! I had a brief exchange of letters with Ligeti.
Listen to Atmosphères
or Lontano of Ligeti
— you have the same music like from 1910. There,
Schoenberg is atonal, not dodecaphonic, not twelve-tone. The
atonal Schoenberg before becoming a dodecaphonist is the best!

BD: Do you do
any twelve-tone pieces at all?

GW: Ja, other Schoenberg works like the
Klavierkonzert, the Piano Concerto is twelve-tone
music, also Lichtspielszene, Music for a Movie Scene, as well as
the Variations for Orchestra.
It’s absolutely twelve-tone music, and it is so like in a
straightjacket. I feel it so. The young Schoenberg, the
atonal Schoenberg, is absolutely free, a genius thinking very much to
the future! It’s fantastic! I made a Nonesuch record of this
— Schoenberg, Stravinsky Dumbarton
Oaks and Webern First Cantata.
It’s very difficult to sing Webern. I made much in modern music,
I think more than any other conductor. For the people and for the
audience, I was a revolutionary conductor. I did it all for the
concerts in Köln in the subscription concerts. Not in
special concerts, in subscription concerts.

BD: Did the
public take to it, or no?

GW: It was
after the War, the first years after the War, and this great music
couldn’t be played in Hitler time. It was forbidden, you know, Entartete Musik (degenerate music)
for twelve years. After that, I came with all this very hard
avant-garde music. I was almost thirty years chief conductor of
the concerts in Köln. I gave them Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart,
Matthäus-Passion, h-Moll Messe, Missa Solemnis and all, so that
they take also the modern music from me.

BD: Should
there always be a balance between the masterworks and the modern works?

GW: You have
masterworks, surely. Music for
Strings, Percussion and Celesta of Bartók is absolutely a
masterwork; also the Divertimento.
It’s fantastic music, and you have things like the Symphony of Psalms by
Stravinsky. What you have, you have, but I don’t think that very
much will be kept from the last twenty years. I’m not sure.
I cannot say. I did so much for modern music. I used the
manuscript when I did the Turangalîla-Symphonie
of Messiaen for the first time in concert in Köln. Messaien
was there in the audience. He was a friend of mine. Two or
three hundred people walked out during our playing. After five
minutes they went out and slammed the doors. So I stopped and
said, “Just a moment, please. Two weeks ago I was here for the Third Symphony of Bruckner led by
Hermann Abendroth, and you were very appreciative.
Please remember that when Bruckner himself conducted the first
performance of this work in Vienna with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra,
at the end of the concert there were only twenty people left in the
hall. All others had gone! They were upset and cursing and
laughing, but Bruckner himself was standing there quiet. Please
think on it,” I said to those people in the concert with
Messaien. “Please think on it and perhaps now you will let us
play this new work. After we have played, if you think it is bad
then you can say so, but let us play now, please.” There was a
roar from the crowd! Messaien was sitting in the audience and
asked, “What did you say? What did you say?” because the people
were so excited!

BD: Do you
have some advice for composers today who are writing symphonic works?

GW: For the
existence of the composer, it’s necessary that he earns money to
live. So perhaps it is right that the radio stations like the
ones in Köln or Hamburg or Munich give commissions to write a
symphony or a piano concerto. They don’t need to depend on the
audience. In earlier times, the composers must have a success not
for the radio station but for the audience in the theaters and the
concert halls. Think about Stravinsky and Sacre du Printemps. People
hit each other out of pure ecstasy and excitement, but it was the
public and Stravinsky learned from all these things what to do.
To write music, one needs to think how music today must sound, but also
you must have an audience. The modern composers have got their
money whether they have audience or not at the special concerts called
“Musica Viva.” It’s only a little circle who are
interested. I had in Köln the subscription concerts, and for
each subscription concert there would always be a modern piece.
Whether the public liked it or not, there was a really modern piece of
avant garde music. I had that chance to do them. After
twelve years of the War we had not heard these fantastic works of
Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, so I also was able to
conduct masterworks of modern music. It was a great opportunity
after twelve years. I remember when I did for the first time the Symphony of Psalms by
Stravinsky. The old head of our culture ministry of the city of
Köln was a well known accountant and almost eighty years
old. He came in the intermission and said, “I like more
Brahms.” [Laughter] I said, “But Dr. Fuchs, I hope you
agree with me that is absolutely great music. It is already
noteworthy in the history of music.” He
said, “Your history, Mr. Wand, is not my history.” [Much
laughter] I will never forget it. It was fantastic because
he said it with so much love and devotion.

*
* *
* *

BD: I’ve
asked about advice to composers. Do you have advice for young
conductors?

GW: There are
great temptations — trials — because
if anywhere there seems to be a gift or talent for a young man, the
media comes immediately.

BD: Records
and films?

GW: Yes, and
they do not have the time for development, for the musician to develop
himself.

BD: It’s too
fast?

GW: Ja! Absolutely. Here in
America you do not have these little theaters that we have in Germany
— city theaters or village theaters that do Shakespeare and
operettas and operas with an orchestra of maybe forty. It is best
for you to begin there, like I did. It was 1932 and I was twenty
years old. It was the year before Hitler came. I was asked
to study with the singers, to do piano rehearsals with the singers to
study, for example, Rocco in Fidelio.
I was twenty years old and had to work with people who were much older
than I was. They were learning these roles for the first time,
and this is already a psychological experience for me. I had to
play on the stage when the director came and began the
rehearsals. We had no orchestra then, just a piano player and I
had to do it. In my first year I had to play a long time with the
director of the theater who made the production. So you must play
piano. You must not play like Horowitz or like Rubinstein, you
must play like a conductor. That’s quite another thing
— not like a pianist but like a conductor who knows how it
sounds in the orchestra and helps the singers with his sound. I
had so many students later who could wonderfully play a Mozart sonata
or a Beethoven sonata, but they couldn’t play Tosca.

BD: They
couldn’t play an operatic score?

GW:
Couldn’t. They tried to play it so exact — Tosca or Ballo in Maschera or the others
— like it should be a sonata. Every
time. It’s hard. You must give the impression to the
singers of what comes from the orchestra to help them. The last
years when I did operas, it was in Frankfurt where Christoph von
Dohnányi was the Director.

After the war, Dohnányi
studied law in Munich, but in 1948 he transferred to the Hochschule
für Musik und Theater München to study composition, piano and
conducting. At the opera in Munich, he was a stage extra, coached
singers, and was a house pianist. He received the Richard Strauss Prize
from the city of Munich, and then went to Florida State University to
study with his grandfather.

His first position as assistant was at the Frankfurt Opera, appointed
by Georg Solti, where he also served as a ballet and opera coach. He
was general musical director of the Lübeck Opera from 1957–1963,
then Germany's youngest GMD. He also served as chief conductor of the
Staatsorchester Kassel and chief conductor of the Westdeutsche Rundfunk
Sinfonie Orchester. In 1968 he succeeded Solti as general music
director and later 'director' at the Frankfurt opera and served in both
capacities until 1977. He took the positions of intendant and chief
conductor with the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1977, and relinquished those
posts in 1984.

As director of the Frankfurt Opera and with his team including Gerard
Mortier (Director of Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels,
Salzburg Festival, Opéra de Paris), Peter Mario Katona (Director
of Casting at ROH Covent Garden) and Klaus Schultz, Dramaturg in Munich
(Bayerische Staatsoper) and Berlin (Philharmonic Orchestra), then
General Manager of the Stadttheater Aachen, Nationaltheater Mannheim,
and Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich, the balance in programming of
traditional opera performance and innovative Musiktheater, promoting
the idea of Regietheater, established Frankfurt opera as a leading
house at that time. He continued this concept in Hamburg.

-- From an article about
Christoph von Dohnányi

I did Don Giovanni and
Fidelio, and Orfeo of Gluck and others. I
had this repetiteur who played my rehearsals on the stage, and I often
said, “Come and conduct,” and then I played. In Köln, with Otello and Così fan Tutti, the singers
were always very glad when I played because they had the feeling of
what comes from the orchestra. Playing the piano reduction of Tristan is quite another thing than
playing a piano work. So I learned it and did it well by twenty
years old. Then I must keep attention for the moon
— there’s a moon going up in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the
lightning in Rigoletto.
We did not have the computers like it is today. I was sitting
next to a lighting engineer with my piano score waiting for the piccolo
to cue the lightening. I also cued when the moon is up and the
moon is down, and all these things. I also conducted the four
herald trumpets in the first act of Lohengrin.
They were on the stage and they couldn’t see the conductor, but they
must see the conductor because it is very difficult with the
orchestra. So I was behind the great oak tree. There was a
hole in the tree, in the wood, and I looked at the conductor and the
trumpets looked at me. Then in the second act I led the Tower
Music. You have to learn all of this and do it with love.

BD: You have
to have all of this experience in order to bring the opera to life?

GW:
Yes. A young conductor must know all of what happens in an opera
house, and that is not so easy. Another example is in the third
act of Tosca. After the
shephard’s song there are the morning bells of
Rome. We had not a computer then. Today it’s very
easy. We had a telegraph. The conductor could use his left
hand for the telegraph, and he would send one, two, one, two. We
were backstage and could see it.

BD: So that
solved the problems of coordination!

GW: In my
second year I had to do eight or ten compositions for plays
— Die
Räuber and Tell
of Schiller, and Faust.

BD: You
conducted the incidental music?

GW: I wrote the music for
these. I was young and had success with my compositions. I
think it is good to try to do it. It was a very good success with
songs to texts of Rilke. Elisabeth Höngen sang it. I
wrote a very difficult thing, more difficult than Zerbinetta. It
is published by Schott. The first performance was in Lausanne in
Switzerland in 1949 or ‘50, and in Berlin and in Frankfurt and so
on. I am always asked why I didn’t more write more, even
operas. I wanted to conduct the symphonic masterworks.
Before the end of the War, I was just an opera conductor. After
the War I had the need to present the great symphonic repertoire, and
so it was for me finished with my composition. When you can
conduct a Mozart symphony or a Schubert symphony, there is an enormous
difference from what you feel you do as composer. I thought I can
conduct.

BD:
Fortunately, you conduct extraordinarily well. One last
question. Is conducting fun?

GW: Ja, it can be heavenly. There
are certain things that one doesn’t talk about. The musicians,
they feel it also; they don’t speak about it. It is not usual,
but it’s like meeting in another world.

BD: Thank you
for bringing your music to Chicago.

GW: I am very
happy that it was possible, but I was also anxious. They were
playing with so much love, it was fantastic.

The German conductor Günter Wand, who has died aged 90, was a
latecomer to the music scene in Britain, but in the past two decades he
established himself as one of the great interpreters of the
19th-century tradition, impressing most especially in his
interpretations of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner.

Though Wand made his British debut as long ago as 1951, it was only on
his appointment as chief guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra
in the 1980s that his visits became a regular feature of the London
concert season, and were eagerly awaited and highly praised. Yet this
late stage told only part of the story.

Born in Elberfeld, he initially studied piano and
composition at the Musik Hochschule in Cologne, a city he was to be
associated with for much of his career. Beginning as a repetiteur, his
early conducting engagements were in Wuppertal and Detmold, until, in
1939, he became a staff conductor at the Cologne Opera, where he worked
until it was bombed in 1944. He moved for a year to the Mozarteum in
Salzburg, but when the Cologne Opera reopened in 1945, he was appointed
music director. In 1946 he became conductor of the Gurzenich Orchestra,
the concert-giving element of the Cologne Opera Orchestra, and
continued in this role until 1974.

During this time he was much associated with the new music of
Varèse, Messiaen, Zimmermann and Ligeti, something which no
doubt will come as a surprise to his British fans, who only heard him
in a much more traditional repertoire. In this he resembled Otto
Klemperer, who had also turned away from the contemporary in his later
years. But even after Wand moved to Hamburg in 1981 as conductor of the
Nord Deutsche Rundfunk Orchestra, he maintained a much wider range of
works in his programmes than he ever offered in Britain. In addition to
recordings made with orchestras in Cologne and Hamburg, he recorded
commercially with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.

His association with the BBC was the result of the then controller of
music, Robert Ponsonby, checking out the new appointment in Hamburg.
The orchestra, under their principal conductor Klaus Tennstedt, had
been invited by me to the Edinburgh festival. When Tennstedt suddenly
resigned, the management of the orchestra asked for a few weeks' grace
to sort the situation out. After they appointed Wand, I felt unable to
maintain the invitation since he was so completely unknown here.
Ponsonby took the trouble to go to Hamburg to hear him, and the
eventual result was the invitation to the BBC and many outstanding
concerts.

On succeeding Ponsonby, I, as it were, inherited Wand, whom I had still
not met, though I had heard him and been much impressed. At our first
meeting he insisted he would only perform Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven
and Bruckner (though he did on one occasion conduct Stravinsky's Firebird Suite). I did not find
this a problem, since his interpretations of the composers he wanted to
concentrate on were both memorable and authoritative.

He insisted on a minimum of eight rehearsals for a standard programme,
a luxury that only a broadcasting organisation could afford to offer.
His rehearsals were meticulous and much appreciated by the orchestra,
who respected him as part of a vanishing tradition. He demanded the
highest standards of players and their total concentration, finding it
hard to cope with any absences, especially of players he came to know
and like, notably the co-leader Bela Dekany.

But with the passing of time, the problems became more worrying. He
became extremely reluctant to commit to programmes in advance, and
tended to want to change at the last moment. This usually meant the
substitution of whatever he had agreed by one of his favourite Bruckner
symphonies. In 1995, he refused at the very last moment to conduct a
Prom programme of Mozart and Tchaikovsky and insisted on Bruckner's Eighth, the fourth time he had
conducted it in five years.

His rehearsals became more irascible, and usually included at least one
walk-out with threats never to return. His English was limited, and
after the retirement of Bill Relton, the manager, and Dekany, there was
no one in the management who spoke good German. This led to
misunderstandings and, coupled with increasingly poor health, to
frequent cancellations. On one occasion, he cancelled a Prom after the
first day's rehearsal, the more galling since he had appeared earlier
that week in Edinburgh with his German orchestra.

Though he spoke often of his veneration for Furtwängler, in many
ways his behaviour reminded one of Klemperer, outspoken in his contempt
for his colleagues, notably those such as Dohnányi or Pritchard
who had followed him at the Cologne Opera. He was capable of great
kindness and considerable charm, but also of appalling bursts of
irrational rage, directed most often at his long-suffering wife. Like
Klemperer, he chose to live in London in the Hyde Park Hotel and, since
he always ate in the restaurant and liked very expensive wines,
complained regularly that his hotel bill was more than his conducting
fee.

Despite the challenge of his unpredictable temperament, few conductors
of our time have come closer to a deep understanding of either Schubert
or Bruckner. Putting up with the insults was almost always worth it in
the end.

This interview was recorded at his hotel in Chicago on January
23, 1989. Portions
were used (with recordings) on WNIB later that year, and again in
1997. This
transcription was made and posted on this
website early in 2013.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been
transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award
- winning
broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago
from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of
2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and
journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM,
as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website
for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of
other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also
like
to call your attention to the photos and information about his
grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a
century ago. You may also send him E-Mail
with comments, questions and suggestions.